Monday, 4 January 2016

The guide

Before and over the Christmas break, Christina and I have done some more work on our bmeta package, which I've already mentioned in another post, here $-$ well, to be fair, Christina has done most of the work; I was being annoying suggesting changes to the maths formatting and thinking about potential new plots or additions just one second after she'd finished coding up the previous batch...Anyway, one of the things we felt was missing, was a detailed guide to the package $-$ and so we wrote one. I guess the point is that there are quite a lot of options that the user is free to select/change, when using bmeta. And many of these are not quite easy to put in the standard R help file. Also, the package implements many more-or-less standard models and so I thought it would be a good idea to actually write down what these are.We've also included some text about how bmeta does create some relevant JAGScode that is used to do the analysis but can also be modified by the user $-$ that's effectively a set of templates for Bayesian meta-analysis and meta-regression.I've put the development version (0.1.2) on the website with some (probably irrelevant for the R-versed users) info on how to install it $-$ we'll do some more testing before we upload it on CRAN too.